


from childhood's hour

by CallisteDawn



Series: alone [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Angst, First Meetings, Gen, Kind of a fix-it, M/M, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-22
Updated: 2014-03-22
Packaged: 2018-01-16 15:14:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1352068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CallisteDawn/pseuds/CallisteDawn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Can or can't doesn't mean anything,” Phil tells her. “There's only <i>won't</i> and <i>die trying</i>."</p>
            </blockquote>





	from childhood's hour

**Author's Note:**

> Last of a trilogy of stories, the other two must be read first to really follow this. Click on the link to the series to find them.

Phil is a Junior Agent. He's ground support for an Op that's above his clearance, and it itches at his instincts not to know all the details. It makes him paranoid.

Phil ignores it, as he always does, because by definition paranoia is irrational. It's fear for no logical reason. Phil likes to base his responses in evidence, and a large majority of the time, his paranoia amounts to nothing. He works a lot of Operations that are above his clearance.

This time, Phil is right to be paranoid.

*

Phil is a Senior Agent. Level Eight. He is standing on the outside of one-way glass, staring at – something. A person. An imposter. He distracts himself from Natasha's words with silly fantasies of alternate realities and alien shape shifters. She stops speaking. Phil is grateful.

The man in the room looks like Clint. But Phil knows just from watching him that he's not. Not really. This isn't the man Phil lost to Loki's spear. He's not even the man Phil recruited all those years ago. This is a man who had Natasha but did not have Phil, if Natasha's report is accurate.

“Alternate reality?” Phil asks her, and hope is a terrible, irrational thing sometimes. Natasha presses her lips together, looking pained.

“I don't think so,” she says. “He – you're still there, in his head. Your influence is anyway. Just not – you.” Natasha speaks low, like she does to Clint when she tells him things he doesn't want to hear. She's never used that voice on Phil. It makes his skin itch.

“The only way to know for sure is for me to walk in there,” Phil says, because it's the truth, and saying it will make it real, will force him to follow through. Natasha doesn't look at him.

“If you can't, we'll figure something else out.” Natasha's words burn, low in his stomach, like the hooch they homemade in the sandbox. She's treating him like Clint, and he's not sure why.

“There is no such thing as _can't_ , Agent Romanoff,” Phil tells her, a subtle reminder of who she's talking to. She doesn't flinch. “There's only _won't_ , and _die trying_.”

She turns to him, then, eyes wide and shuttered. Like she's not sure what she's seeing. Like he's a stranger. Phil buries all the screaming voices in his head under cool professionalism. _This is my job_ , Phil tells himself, and walks around Natasha and her unfathomable gaze to walk into the holding room.

*

Phil startles awake tied to a chair, gasping and damp and cold. He has yet to learn how to wake in stillness. _Allison,_ he thinks first, and then tells himself to put that thought and all of its associations into a box in his head, and close it.

Later, he will be grateful that this experience is his first being captured by an enemy while working for SHIELD. His very short stint as a POW in the Rangers did not really teach him anything about the sorts of situations he would face in this part of his career.

Phil is tied to a chair. This is what he notices first. It's only after this that his brain registers _hostile, front_. The man is short, he thinks, with blonde hair and wide shoulders. Phil has never seen him before in his life, but the arrows he's carefully cleaning and repairing on the table between them give away who he is.

Phil knows a lot of reverse interrogation techniques, and techniques for resisting torture, and even techniques for getting himself killed in these kinds of situations. What Junior Agent Coulson doesn't know is which of those he should use in the situation where he's sitting across from an assassin who kills using a bow and arrow.

“Thank you for helping me save the boy,” Phil decides on.

“Sure. Sorry about the rest of your team,” the man says in response, though he doesn't stop what he's doing with his weaponry. “You weren't supposed to be there. Client gave me bad intel.” He shrugs, a little, and moves on to fiddling with the shaft of an arrow.

“Hmm,” Phil hums, devoid of inflection. He stays silent for several minutes, takes his time to examine the room they're in, the ropes tying him down, the slant of the light outside. He can't tell how long he's been out for. It's definitely cooler than it was when he lost consciousness. Finally, he speaks up again. “How's this going to work, then?”

“How's what?” The archer asks. Again, he doesn't look up, or pay Phil much attention at all.

“I'm not dead,” Phil tells him. “I assume because I was getting the boy to safety, which was something you wanted too. However, I also didn't wake up in the middle of a street or in an ER. I woke up tied to this chair with you sitting two feet away ignoring me. So I have to assume you need something from me.”

The man looks up. He has blue eyes, and his mouth makes a frown shape. “You're sharp, huh? You're also SHIELD. Do the math. Last thing I want is to get hunted to the ends of the earth by you assholes. I'm handing you back to them as a good faith gesture, or whatever it's called. Then I leave free and clear, after you explain I only killed that tall agent because he looked like he was part of Moore's security team.”

“His name was Kennedy,” Phil tells him. The man seems to be beating himself up over that mistake. This situation is starting to feel a little surreal. Phil wonders how hard he hit his head. “And he was embedded in Moore's security detail. It wasn't an unreasonable assumption. My name is Phil, by the way.” The archer's entire demeanor changes at Phil's introduction. He rolls his eyes, hard, and huffs out a laugh.

“Save the playbook for someone else, probie. I don't need to know your name.”

“No,” Phil agrees. “But you do need to know that your client is trying to kill you.”

*

Nothing prepares Agent Coulson for what he meets in that room. Nothing in existence could have. Phil walks out shattered into pieces. Natasha meets him in the hallway and steers him towards his office, where she locks the door and turns the lights down. Phil puts his head between his legs and tries to remember how to breathe.

“He's not right,” she says, seemingly to the air, and Phil wants to scream. Of course he's not right, _of course not_ , he doesn't remember Phil at all, how could Clint be right without Phil?

“Why are you here, Natasha?” Phil manages to choke out. Normally, she would be the only one welcome, because Clint is hers too, but her behavior is erratic and making him feel worse. Phil doesn't have the space left in his head to deal with whatever she has going on.

Natasha walks over to him, crouches down next to his chair. She places a soft, killer's hand over his on the back of his neck.

“Because he's not right, Coulson. He's only mine if he's yours first. Now he doesn't fit at all. So we just have to fix this. Whatever it takes.”

Coulson breathes. Natasha does not break her promises. “Whatever it takes,” he agrees.

*

“How did we meet?” Clint asks him, bouncing a ball against the wall of his quarters. He must be bored out of his skull, Phil observes, and makes a note to get him some crosswords and puzzle games.

“You killed my Senior Agent during an Operation of ours. You were taking out the subject for a client that wanted you in SHIELD's cross-hairs.”

“Close enough to how I remember it, then.” _No,_ Phil thinks, the ache that never eases becoming sharper in his chest. _How you remember it will never be close enough._

*

The total stillness that comes over the man is impressive. Then he shoots out of his chair, sending it skidding across the floor. Phil clenches his jaw automatically in surprise, and then makes a note of the response to work on later. He can not show intimidation in these situations.

“What the fuck do you know? You don't even know who my client is.”

“I don't have to. Kennedy was embedded with Moore's detail for three months. So was Trevor, and Allison, my partner, had been working as a Secretary in his company for four. It was an eight man team and included six months of prep work, most of it so high above my clearance level I'm not even sure what department it originated from. I do know that we had to beat off the FBI, Interpol, and the NSA for dibs on this guy. Someone like that, and your client gave you 'bad intel'? I don't think so. They knew an Agency of some kind was sniffing around the guy. They set you up.”

“That doesn't mean anything for sure. It's all, what, conjecture.” The assassin is quick with his comeback, but he looks a little red in the face, and he's staring intently at Phil without blinking.

Phil pauses, considering the man. “Is that really something you're willing to chance your life on?”

The archer considers him right back. “No, I guess not. I suppose this is where you say I should untie you?”

“Not at all,” Agent Coulson allows, and stands up easily, dropping the ropes that were holding him to the floor and brushing off his suit. “This is where I say we should probably relocate before whatever other assassin your client found to finish you off arrives. Also, do you happen to have my pistol?”

*

Carson's Carnival of Traveling Wonders has been out of business for a long time. Phil and Natasha find Madame Drina in Chicago, a month after Clint comes back into SHIELD. She's blind and hooked up to a dialysis machine, but she is still coherent enough to tell them what they need to know. Phil asks her if she can perform the task herself, in her state, and she laughs and laughs. Natasha turns sharply away from the woman and strides towards the exit.

“I always knew that boy would be something else,” Madam Drina finally says. “But he's not right for it anymore, whatever it was. I will do whatever I can to make that right again, you understand. Hawkeye is special. But I cannot do what you ask without a sacrifice.”

“I know. I'm prepared for that.” Phil hears Natasha pulling open the drawers of the cart placed next to the door, fiddling and restless in a way he has never encountered before.

“Are you really? What was taken from him as payment was what he loved most. I must take something of equal value to return that to him.” She breathes slowly. “Can you really afford to give what needs to be given?”

“Can or can't doesn't mean anything, ma'am,” he tells her. “There's only 'won't' and 'die trying'. Whatever it takes.”

“Yes,” Natasha says, suddenly at his side. There is a sharp prick in his neck, and the room goes fuzzy at the edges. Natasha catches him as his legs give out, lands him in a chair. Carefully, she arranges him so that he will be comfortable, her hands soft and considerate and full of apology. She checks the injection site in his neck and then places a palm on his cheek. “Whatever it takes,” she whispers to him. “He's not right without you, Phil. What makes you think you'll be right without him?” She sighs, rubs her thumb a little on the skin next to the bridge of his nose. “What the two of you have – well. It's not something I'll ever have.”

She stands then, removes her hand and turns away without ceremony. Phil tries to speak and finds that he can not.

“Madam Drina,” Natasha says, formal and bowing slightly at the waist. He's not sure if he wants to watch this. He's not sure he has a choice. His vision is getting blurrier by the second, and a heaviness is pulling at his eyelids. “Please accept whatever I have to give as a sacrifice in Hawkeye's place, and return to him what was taken.”

“I'll ask you what I asked your companion. Can you really afford to give what needs to be given?”

Natasha smiles, Phil thinks. His vision starts to go black. “Nothing I have to give will equal what Clint gave. But it's because of that I'm giving it back to him. I keep my promises.”

*

For several beats, the man stares at him, eyes wide and mouth slightly agape. Then he bursts out laughing.

“Oh my god,” he manages after a whole minute of this, wiping his eyes. “ _Oh my god_ you've got brass ones, where do they make you? Is all of SHIELD like you? Christ, where did you learn to get out of restraints like that?”

“Afghanistan,” Phil tells him, deadpan and a little too honest. The archer's face is made for laughing.

“Holy Christ,” he swears again. “Phil, right? It's nice to meet you.” He sticks his hand out, like they're strangers meeting in the street. Phil shakes it, maybe a little too firmly. “My name is Clint. We should definitely hang out after this is over.”

“I think I'd like that, Clint,” Phil says.


End file.
